38 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIII. No. 311 



plough has wearing guards of hardened steel wherever it can touch 

 the edge of the conduit slot ; and the shoes are made of soft metal, 

 which takes up all the wear and prevents any injury to the conduc- 

 tors. Two ploughs are used on each car for the sake of absolute 

 reliability. 



For suburban lines, or for small cities where the traffic does not 

 justify the employment of the more expensive conduit system, the 

 company furnishes its elevated conductor system. The elevated 

 conductors can be either bracketed off from poles, or hung from 

 wires crossing the street at any desired height above the roadway. 

 Electrical connection between the motor on the car and the elevat- 

 ed conductors is maintained by means of a trolley or contact-brush 

 and a flexible conductor. 



The motor and mechanism of a car operate noiselessly, and are 

 entirely concealed from view beneath the bottom of the car. Cars 

 may be stopped as quickly as desired, may reverse at will, and, if 

 derailed, can propel themselves back on the track. 



The motor is controlled from either end of the car ; and the 

 driver may proceed at any speed, from a slow creep to that of 

 twenty miles an hour. 



SCIENTIFIC NEWS IN WASHINGTON. 



The ArchEeology of the District of Columbia. — Our Future Empire. — 

 Science and Psychos. 



The Archaeology of the District of Columbia. 



The Anthropological Society of Washington consists of four 

 sections, each in charge of a vice-president, but none thus far def- 

 initely organized : viz., Section A, somatology ; Section B, soci- 

 ology ; Section C, philology, physiology, and psychology ; Section 

 D, technology. It has of late become apparent to members inter- 

 ested in archaeology (which is included in the last section) that this 

 subject has received inadequate attention during the past year or 

 two, and especially that too little attention has been given to the 

 archseology of the District of Columbia and contiguous territory. 

 In order to strengthen this branch of anthropology, and at the same 

 time to stimulate local investigators, a temporary organization of 

 Section D has been effected. At a meeting of the members of the 

 society interested in local work, called by the vice-president of the 

 section. Dr. O. T. Mason, last week, it was decided to combine ef- 

 forts and results, with the immediate object of elucidating the his- 

 tory of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Potomac River as recorded 

 in relics and early writings, and with the ultimate object of prepar- 

 ing and publishing a monograph on the antiquities of the District 

 of Columbia. A committee was appointed to prepare rdsumes of 

 existing knowledge on various phases of the subject for presenta- 

 tion at one of the meetings of the society in April next. This com- 

 mittee, which has power to add to its numbers, is as follows : 

 geology in its relations to early man, W. J. McGee of the United 

 States Geological Survey ; paleolithic man and his remains, Thomas 

 Wilson, curator of antiquities of the Smithsonian Institution ; relics 

 of the later aborigines, S. V. Proudfit of the Interior Department ; 

 prehistoric settlements and workshops. Dr. Elmer R. Reynolds of 

 the Pension Office ; aboriginal tribes recorded by early explorers, 

 James Mooney of the Bureau of Ethnology. 

 Our Future Empire. 



The event of the sixteenth regular meeting of the National Geo- 

 graphic Society on the nth inst. was the presentation of an elabo- 

 rate paper on " The Great Plains of Canada," by Mr. C. A. Ken- 

 aston. During several seasons of constant exploration, undertaken 

 with the object of ascertaining the agricultural, pastoral, and other 

 capabilities of the country, Mr. Kenaston became thoroughly ac- 

 quainted with the vast expanse of plain country stretching from 

 Hudson Bay to the foot-hills of the Rockies, and from the interna- 

 tional boundary to the Arctic Circle. The entire tract is one un- 

 interrupted, monotonous, grassy plain, sloping gently to the east- 

 ward and northward, diversified only by shallow lakes and broad 

 water-ways in the east, and by shallow but steep-sided canons of 

 the rivers beginning in the mountains in its central and western 

 portions. The general hydrography, the more detailed topographic 

 features, the flora, the fauna, and the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay 

 Company, — the link connecting the aborigines with the white in- 



vaders who now possess the land, — were all described at length ; 

 and it was pointed out that this region, long the home of the buf- 

 falo, the wolf, the badger, and uncounted myriads of wild fowl, is 

 the American wheat-field of the future. In the south-eastern por- 

 tion of the tract the soil is a dark prairie loam, like that of Minne- 

 sota and Iowa ; west and north-west of it lie millions of acres of 

 " gumbo " soil, refractory under the first efforts of the agriculturist, 

 but made fruitful by two or three seasons of tillage ; while the soil 

 of the northern plains is a fertile yellow loam or bowlder drift ; and 

 over twenty millions of acres the conditions of soil and climate are 

 alike so favorable to wheat-growing, that only peopling by farmers 

 and the opening of transportation routes are needed to make any 

 part of it successfully rival the famous wheat-fields of Minnesota 

 and Dakota. Already the tract is intersected by the Canadian 

 Pacific and many other railways, the navigable rivers are being sup- 

 plied with steam-craft, and the lands along railways and water- 

 ways are generally sectionized and open to occupation ; and the 

 present prospects are that this northern expansion of the Great 

 Plains of America will be overrun by settlement nearly as rapidly 

 as was the part drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries. 



Science and Psychos. 



On Friday evening last, some thirty or forty scientific men as- 

 sembled at the residence of Mr. W. A. Croffut, to " assist " at some 

 experiments in hypnotism by that gentleman. Among those pres- 

 ent were Professor N. S. Shaler, G. K. Gilbert, Dr. T. N. Gills, A. 

 H. Thompson, W. C. Winrock, Col. Garrick Mallery, Gen. Adam 

 Badeau, Major Powell, and Mr. F. M. Thorn, chief of the Coast 

 Survey, besides several members of Congress. While one of the 

 hypnotized sensitives was personating an aged colored preacher, 

 he was violently seized by Major Powell, denounced as an impos- 

 tor, and' thrust out of the room. He seemed unconscious of the 

 strange interruption, and the stream of his exhortation flowed on 

 unbroken to the end, until Mr. Croffut appeared and recalled him 

 from the trance. Major Powell then made some remarks on 

 hypnotism and the relation of its hallucinations to other states, 

 especially to mental abstraction and heterophemy, and the de- 

 sirableness of subjecting its phenomena to scientific conditions 

 and observation. 



CENSUS OF THE DEFECTIVE CLASSES. 



At the suggestion of Senator Eugene Hale, chairman of the 

 census committee of the United States Senate, Professor A. Graham 

 Bell addressed a letter to the committee, in which he refers to some 

 of the results of the census of 1880, especially with reference to the 

 relative increase of the deaf, the blind, the idiotic, and the insane 

 within recent years, as compared with the population in the United 

 States, and to deafness as caused by the marriage of the deaf with 

 the deaf, and makes some suggestions as to the taking of the next 

 census. As this communication is of considerable importance at 

 the present time, when preparations are being made for the next 

 census, we reproduce it here in extenso. 



According to the census retuVns, the defective classes have in- 

 creased 400 per cent in thirty years, while the general population 

 of the country has simply doubled. The following table shows the 

 relative figures at each census since iSijo: — 



I have examined with care the statistics of the Tenth Census 

 relating to the deaf-and-dumb, and find internal evidence to show 

 that in their case there has been a real increase greater than the 

 increase of the general population, and not simply an apparent 



